Loss and Gain
by timelucked
Summary: The Meta-crisis Doctor gives himself so that Rose may live, pushing her into the arms of the 11th, closing the gap in time and space. Bereft at the loss, can this new man hold any comfort for her when he himself still struggles? Full summary on inside.


Alternate Description: After the battle (explained in text) that lost her the love of her life, Rose finds herself staring into the unfamiliar eyes of a man she had once known. This place that was once her home holds no comfort for her now when the place she had forged as one had been ripped away. Can Rose cope with the loss of one love when she's staring into the eyes at the gain of another?

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><p>The blades – no, no, too strong of a word for the soft green silk that tickled just beneath her shoulders – felt soft against her back, licking her creamy skin with its early morning touch. The stars had never seemed so bright to her before.<p>

Everything in that other world, that phantom world she didn't even want to think on – the one that only blazed with the effects of collapse - dimmed around her.

She thought maybe it was because she could only look at them, look at the stars, through the filter of knowing she was no longer special, no longer extraordinary enough to visit and greet each with that great intake she always took. With the awe it deserved. With that great bound out of that great blue box behind that great brown and blue man.

The stars were dim because her prospects of seeing them were dim, faded until they were nothing but the remnants of dust scattered throughout space – with only time to carry their once-light to her; mocking her.

Time. It was always against her, always pitting her against one fate or another, always dictating what course she should take, yet always guiding her down the right one. She ran from it as surely as she embraced it. But this time, down that slow-path she had to face surely and irrevocably alone, she couldn't help but look at time with contempt, with a hatred she reserved for the daleks and the cybermen and the everything that took her away from her love.

_I know you! _She had shouted one day to the sky that wasn't her own; the one where a president ruled and zeppelins flew. _I know you better than I know myself!_ She screamed. _I know you because I was you, I am you, I will always _be_ you! _She had fallen to her knees in the grass that smelled so foully wrong. The grass that smelled of a home never to be. _We – are – the same! _She wept, _so stop punishing me. Stop taking everything away because you can't have it. Stop time because I know you can because I did too! Or speed it up so that one day I can pass all this pain and meet Him in that place He doesn't even believe in. _She choked upon her sob, her hands fisted and buried in her eyes. _Please let me see him, just one more time. Please let me see my Doctor, just one last time. Just once, be kind, please._

And then she thought the universe had been kind. Time had given her a parallel to the man she loved, had given her a chance to be with that man she knew and fought for; had braved storms and universes and galaxies for. It was him just as surely as the Time Lord before her was too. She leapt at the chance to claim him for hers and he met her halfway this time, not running – so tired of running, he let himself do what he had always wanted to. Her Doctor, that mirror man with only one heart and one life and one chance to throw it all away and stick his lot in with her, finally let himself fall. To share that one adventure he thought he could never have. He let himself fall like rain and let his love _finally _pour around her. The Oncoming Storm, dousing his Valiant Child with the love that burned like the twin suns of Gallifrey.

Then that was taken too.

The grass rustled beside her, whispered of another presence settling down. A man stared up at the sky reflectively, his palms resting evenly against his stomach as he nestled deeper into the ground's cool embrace. The churning stars and clouds above flowed into his eyes as he soaked in the power of the universe around him. He turned his head as the girl beside him joined in synchronization, staring deeply into her eyes, blank yet welcoming as they always were, like the empty room that had once – would always – belong to her.

"Hello," his voice husked warmly.

The smile he greeted her with was a brilliant spread that didn't reach his eyes; so haunted, so hollowed with sorrow and regret.

"Hello," she replied evenly.

When she had stared into his eyes so many years ago in a cellar filled with moving dummies, she had seen a war that could never leave a man. She saw a soul rent by the flames of a culture gone. She saw a man without a home desperate to find a new one, to reclaim a bit of what he had once felt. A man who was so weary from running, he just wanted to stop if only his feet could let him.

The next pair he had stared out from weren't blue, but the same brown that steam could simmer off of. A deep mocha that just around the edges, she could see forgiveness and self-appreciation traced around the line of the black irises. Self-love had begun to creep into those eyes, a happy light filling them to the brim as they creased with his manic grin. She still saw traces of that immense, unfathomable sadness, but they eased back and ebbed away from the rough exterior with that sense of home she forged within him.

Now the eyes that stared back at her were an emerald fractured by differing emotions. This was a man, a new man she had never met before but had always known since those beginning days, who held such brimming joy yet such debilitating anger. He was a man that held the quiet and the storm. He bounced with an energy that far surpassed hers, but that was nothing new. That was a constant familiar. But with that happiness, she could see in those deep pools a hatred and turmoil. She despaired that that would never leave him.

She had a resonating feeling that his eyes had only just recently taken the sorrowful shine with the turn of events.

Tears pricked at her eyes as his pinky sought hers, ringing around her own comfortingly. He had never been a man for words, had only ever stammered half-confessions and could only whisper the truth behind a lock of her hair and into her ear, never outright even in the most intimate of times when inhibitions fled and took refuge in the air and out their bodies. But he had never had to. His hand could craft out his apology better than two words could. His lips could capture the depth of his love without the three words most ached to hear, the three she had once yearned to.

The only three words she needed to always hear come from his lips in exaltation were, "Run Rose Tyler."

Now, with the rest of his fingers joining the last member curled around hers, she felt heat sear the backs of her eyes as she fought to remain calm, fought to simply revel in the ground that had always been her true home, and not think of the grass that had strived to fill that void for her and had finally managed to. But she couldn't. A tear spilled out of her eye and left a burning trail down the curve of her cheek, carved out a path of true heartbreak and let it bleed itself into the ground.

"I am _so_ sorry," she heard the man rasp, his voice thick with all the sorrow in the worlds.

She turned to him with desperate eyes knit under a brow so lost and so furrowed, the pain pounded into her mind. She saw not the green and the hurt of this new new man, but the wide and brown of another.

She heard the voice of another whisper above his, like the traces of the two men were still linked despite the difference in each other.

"_I am so sorry, Rose,"_ _she lifted her head, lined against her Doctor's forehead._

"_ROSE!" her head whipped around to where that new man stood framed by the doorway of a new TARDIS at the line, the break, between worlds. His arms extended out to her pleadingly, imploringly as within three people waged a war with the console, trying to pilot while screaming at each other to keep her steady. _

_The collapse of two galaxies submerging and colliding, subducting into each other and there was no way to stop it. _

"_Rose, oh my Rose." _

_Her head shakily turned back to face the man she loved with all her heart, her eyes wide to take in the image of the man as if it were the last time she would ever see him. She knew it would end this way for them, always knew from the moment he had told her on that Beach that he could only get to her through the collapse of two galaxies. Now when she finally had him and had him for two years, it was all going to end. All because a greedy war lord of a planet far past this solar system used a special crystal to rend the fabric of time and space. It wasn't fair. Nothing was fair. Her universe with her Doctor was going to collapse along with the Doctor from the other – the once-right galaxy – and there was nothing she could do._

_Nothing she could do. _

_Her Doctor with his new blue suit looked into her with his eyes so broken, so conflicted – so convinced._

"_This is the only way," she heard before she felt a large hand place itself above her wildly beating heart. _

_She kept her stare direct with his, let herself be enveloped in that love that poured into her like all of time and space did around where they stood, on that brink about to be destroyed and implode sucking everything into it. Everything she had once and always loved and everything she had come to love. Everything was ending and she just looked into the man who had saved her as she had saved him. She found a smile tilt the corners of her mouth subtly knowing as long as she had him, had her Doctor, it didn't matter that everything was ending. In one way or another, she knew it would end this way, end with her in his arms as she was taken from this world and into the next grand adventure where he would be waiting – figmented or not. _

_But he wasn't ready to let that happen. He wasn't willing to let a universe – one or another – be without Rose Tyler. _

_He didn't smile back at her. He lowered his head and captured her lips with his. The kiss was so infused with his love it felt like a punch to Rose's gut, it felt like she had been sent flying back into the furthest reaches of the universe and left to float, to drift with the remnants of his kiss to guide her. _

_Her eyes snapped open. She had been drifting, had been floating with his kiss the last thing on her lips._

_His other hand had come up beside the one already above her heart and with a wrenching strength, pushed her back from him. Her lips left his with an audible pop as she fell backwards. Her wild eyes followed his as she was arched through the dead space between worlds seeing the calm rueful hue in those brown eyes, that deadening stare that knew the justification and knew that everything again rested on him losing everything. _

"_DOCTOR!" the name tore from her throat like the air from her lungs and the beats from her heart seized as she saw him turn away from him and face his fate knowingly. _

"_Rose!" the other gasped, catching her back to his front. _

"_NO!" she screamed, "NO, DOCTOR, NO! DON'T DO THIS, DOCTOR!" _

_This was truly it. There was no way of getting to him. This was their final. This was her truly final days. There were no transporters to an adjacent realm, no TARDIS to re-route. This was it. Her heart pounded throughout her entire being, except where it belonged. It raged in her head, in her throat, behind her eyes, down to her toes and in her stomach, but not in her chest where it fled to join the man that stood so alone on the edge of the universes. _

_The other Doctor, his arms filled with the girl he had lost so long ago, stared up at the man he had generated from genocide and blood. His eyes widened, knowing just what he had planned as surely as he himself would do – because he would have as well – trying to haul Rose in, but she wouldn't let him._

"_No!" she kicked at his shins and struggled in his arms, battering this fake man with her elbows. _

_Her eyes cut back to the man she had shared so much with, had given everything for and to. She saw him reach into the collar of his burgundy tee and lace his finger around something. The light of the other universe burning was hard to squint against but she didn't dare take her eyes off of him. Dragging out a chain from around his neck, the Doctor lifted his head up and breathed in deeply. The smell of the girl once in his arms filled his nose and he found his strength. _

_Before he went through, he did something he had never done. He sang low to himself, hummed that tune that whistled through his body, that never left him. He sang a prayer, his favorite prayer, and sung it out like a hymn. He sang that word, that one word that chorused through his body like a fond melody. He whispered:_

"_Rose."_

_And let the universe claim him._

_There was a blinding light, as white and sterile as one in a hospital, and the TARDIS was rocketed backwards. It spun, faster and faster, propelled by the explosion at the in-between of those worlds. Rose and the imposter Doctor were thrown backwards into the opposite wall of the console room. The three people surrounding the grotesquely new console tumbled and were flung against one another. A man's head connected with the cylinder that held the time rotors – gross and bulbous as opposed to what they had originally been. Two women were caught in a tangle of limb collided with the same man whose forehead bled at one temple. Steam began to pour from a fractured splinter in the cylinder where the man's head had cracked it. _

_Scrambling up against the wall, the Doctor dazedly collected the prone girl who had lost everything in one fell swoop for yet another time, and shouted from his haunches, "VENTS ACTIVATE!" _

_With a great whoosh, the TARDIS obeyed, sucking into its pockets the noxious gas that leaked from the console. It began to fix the webby break and righted itself. The TARDIS, spun out centuries into the past and past five different galaxies, settled itself. The quiet that followed was eerie and thick, punctuated by the girl detaching herself from this Doctor's – her _once_-Doctor's – limp arms where he rested the back of his head in relief. She stood and stalked over to the door, to the TARDIS door she had run out from with glee and merriment so many times before. _

_She placed her hand upon the panels, the panels that were pristine where they were once chipped and broken like the man who had operated them. Her palm pressed into the humming rhythm of the TARDIS. The feeling of it, like a single heart reverberating through a chest, sickened her, made her stomach churn. She let her hand fall and allowed herself to slip. She fell to her knees, blankly staring at the white ahead of her. The softer white than that blinding force that had burned through the man she loved. _

_There was a grating sigh behind her and the rustle of bodies and limbs as the team within this new TARDIS brought themselves to their senses._

"_Doctor," a female voice with a thick accent gutturally called out to the man. _

_It felt so wrong to hear another woman say his name, and to say it to a man, to a Doctor, she hadn't known. That wasn't her Doctor. _

"_Wha' happened?" _

_Taking a few shaking breathes, the man answered with his eyes trained to the back of the blonde-headed woman. _

"_He…He had a gravitational nexus sphere," he swallowed. "Around his neck."_

"_What's a," another man asked, his voice dredged with the pain of having his head partially caved in. "Gravitational nexus sphere?"_

"_It's an orb, like a crystal, with the ability to create a zero-gravity chamber where a seam in space can be sustained. He…he used himself to provide a medium to be that pocket of zero-gravity." _

"_Bu' zero gravity, that…that means –"_

_The Doctor hesitated, wary of having Rose hear this, but he knew it needed to be addressed. _

"_That everything in that pocket becomes nothing, non-existent particles, matter is destroyed. No-gravity means that the matter is expunged. Nothing can survive a vacuum and that's what zero-gravity is." The Doctor lifted his eyes from their lowered, reflective stare towards the ground back up at Rose. "He gave himself to save two universes. He gave himself for the woman he loved and the family he had _come_ to love."_

"_But that science," a new voice piped in, one with a sultry lure that was simply strict in the severity of the situation. "There is no way – Doctor, they, _he_, shouldn't have that ability."_

"_He stole it."_

_All heads whipped to the voice that spoke it, so quiet they weren't sure whether their minds had tricked them._

"_After I told him not to, he still stole it," Rose said. She turned around, still on her knees, and slumped her back against the TARDIS door, staring at her loosely clasped hands between her knees. "I knew he would, knew he couldn't not do it."_

"_But how did he get it?" the hurt man asked, his voice clear now despite his injury. "If River's right and you shouldn't have it, how did he get one?"_

_There was a silence that stretched, Rose too dazed in the aftermath of such a surreal loss, a complete and total loss of not only the man she loved but her family. The Doctor picked up his gaze and looked directly into her vague and glazed over eyes. _

"_Torchwood."_

_Rose gulped past the thickness in her throat, not wanting to cry in front of these people, and more prominently too swept under the pain of it all to even properly feel it. _

"_We've made the biggest advancements because of him. He was head in twelve departments, he – oh god," the onslaught got the best of her and she raised a hand to her mouth, not knowing whether she was about to retch or sob. _

_The tears that streaked from her eyes and stole her body into a fit of shakes was her answer. Her voice caught in her throat in a keening high note of sorrow as her body was raked in choking sobs. Everyone was at a loss of how to handle the situation. River sat back on top of her heels and stared stoically at the grating, the bleeding man wiped his red, puckered brow and followed her lead, staring ahead at the underbelly of the console. The Doctor found his face taken over by the mask he wore when the sorrow built up was too much to handle. He stared out frozenly. _

_Only the woman with the thick accent crawled over. She wrapped an arm around the girl she didn't know and leaned her into her side, mothering her and letting her know she wasn't alone. _

"_Doctor…" the girl spoke at length, rubbing her hand up and down the other girl's arm as she wailed into her cupped hands. "Doctor, who was he?" _

_Rousing himself from his thoughts, the churning self-hatred he easily slipped into now tripled at the loss of the man and the losses felt by the girl before him, the Doctor inhaled and answered;_

"_That was me."_

_The man's eyes snapped over to his._

"_Wha' d'you mean, that was you? That can't be, he was from another _universe_."_

_The Doctor smiled ruefully, giving a humorless chuckle because that's what he did now. That's the sort of man he was. Better to fake a laugh, to laugh without meaning and laugh with that shadow of self-loathing than to give in to the reality of pain. _

"_I left him behind in that universe. He was created from me, borne form me; he and I, we, are the same man – _were_ the same man. That was me before this was me." The Doctor glanced over to Rose who sat up slowly, her mascara trailing black rivers down her face. She wiped it away with the back of her sleeve, shifting away from the girl who held her. She looked directly into the eyes that reflected back into hers. "He wasn't the only one I had left behind in another universe." _

_All eyes trailed over to Rose who sniffed and hid away the rest of her sorrow behind a barely-composed mask. After all these years, she had picked up a thing or twelve from him. _

"_Yeah, well, you're wrong about that," Rose corrected, a surge of emotions seeping from her blood-shot eyes. "He isn't you. _He _was the man I loved." And with that, she stood and made her way up the stairs and through the corridor, leaving the remainder of the crew in choking silence._

And so here she was now, a week in with an entirely new family and no way of getting back to the one she had only so recently gotten back with a new Doctor she cautiously approached and was hesitant to learn about. It wasn't as if this was the first time he had gone about changing who he was. But in the stark severity of finding out he _had_ changed while the man she had spent years loving had died, it was all a very slow process. She didn't want to just jump in with this Doctor; she didn't want to fall with this man because she didn't know whether he was the same man that would catch her if she fell.

Having two hearts just made him more adaptable to heartbreak.

But looking back into his eyes, she saw passed that heart ache – or maybe right through it to its burning core – and knew that the heartbreak that had defined him for so long would be the very reason he _would_ catch her. She could see just how sorry he was.

Rose may have lost the love of her life, lost the bright smiles and warm cuddles at night by the couch and the furtive looks passed over lab equipment, lost her family, but this Doctor had lost himself in the exchange. Lost himself in a way that was somehow even worse than Gallifrey. Worse because he was no longer the only one to feel the affect of that loss. But maybe, in time, that would make it better than losing Gallifrey. Because he now had that someone to share his pain.

The Doctor never wanted that, though. It didn't mean it made him selfishly happy for it.

Rose sighed. "Don't be sorry like that. Don't put the blame on yourself. It wasn't your fault. You didn't open a warp in time and space. You only tried to make it better." She raised a hand up to his cheek and as she began to stroke it, she noticed how the skin there felt exactly the same, even if the bone structure beneath was so different. "Just like you always do." She noted softly, stopping her ministrations and just staring deeply into his eyes, willing herself to love them as dearly as she had the blue and brown. "Always…"

Rose got up on her elbows, the Doctor feeling bereft at the loss of her touch as her hand slipped from his cheek.

"Always," she repeated, peering down at him. He looked at her, even despite his confusion to where she was going. "You're always the same man, aren't you? You really are."

He swallowed and sat up himself, crossing his legs like a pretzel facing her. She mimicked his movement slowly and he gripped her loose hands, one in each of his. "I am," he nodded.

Rose thought for a moment, catching the flesh of her cheek between her teeth as she glanced away. Coming to a decision, she peeked at him from the side, watching as he blinked at her. Turning to face him fully, Rose leant towards him. She stopped just before him, her breath ghosting across his lips, the breathe taken from him at her movement, then ducked her head up and seized his lips with hers.

From experience, the Doctor knew he had always been a clumsy kisser. When Amy had tried, he had been far too preoccupied with shoving her off of him with moral indecision and dilemma. He was so new to his body then, his attitude on kissing reserved only for joking about the task in passing. Then River had captured him from out of the blue, working her way into his pliable mouth. He had floundered into awkward stillness and let her finish. Not that it hadn't been enjoyable, and not that at times he hadn't taken her up on it for more when she snuck up on him in rooms alone, but it always still held that certain awkwardness where his limbs refused to find comfortable purchase against her skin.

Now, his lips moved against Roses as if they had always meant to. He knew they were always meant to from the moment time passed between her lips and his. His past self had been created with her in mind, using her thoughts and the men she leaned towards into account. With Rose, he found his hand sliding up the length of her arm to her shoulder, pulling her closer with ease. She leaned forward with his incentive, her back arched and he trailed his fingers down the dip her spine created, reveling in the fact that he was finally kissing Rose Tyler.

No Cassandra lidded behind those gorgeous eyes closed and fluttering, no Time Vortex and threat of death. Just a Time Lord and a Human, consummating an act the two had dreamed of since the earliest of their days. True, she had done this and so much more – he had no doubt, thanks to evidence provided from Amy and Rory about what two people do together and alone – with his other self, his half-self. But now she had given him this chance, she had given him the opportunity to prove that he was still the same man. For once, the Doctor gave himself over completely to another person. Not to a cause and to a wrong that needed to be righted. He gave himself to Rose because she deserved so much more than him, but he needed her to know that he could never lose her again. So the Doctor let himself, himself and not a clone, fall. His never became now.

Rose didn't know what she was doing. Maybe it was because she just needed to feel the love of someone after feeling so depleted, so ripped open from the loss of the man she loved more than life. But she knew that wasn't it. She knew that with each passing day, she could see that despite his differences, he was absolutely that same man she had fallen in love with, dancing around the TARDIS console, bringing them to wrong destinations. She knew he still felt the same way about her with his secret glances at her where he would stop his playful charade and just stare at her, smile indecipherably and glance down almost shyly with a cough.

Despite her intention not to, she couldn't help fall back in love with him. Though she supposed, she had never fallen out of love with him. It had always been him. And it always would. She still mourned the loss of her Doctor, the Doctor borne out of destruction like she had at one point. Nothing could ever make that sorrow go away. It would follow and be carried with her for the rest of her life.

She suddenly knew that she and the Doctor, this Doctor had something in common. Gallifrey would forever burn in his hearts just like her _John Smith_ _Resident of Flat 2a _would be singed in hers.

With that in mind, she felt a heightened level of kinship with this man. With the true Doctor she had fallen in love with first. She also knew, rationally, she would be prone to falling in love with him anyways. Just as she had with the Doctor replicated in 'Pete's World'

She had thought she would never love that sham of a man who wore leather two sizes too big. She thought she could never fall back in love with that man with brown eyes where there should have been striking blue crystal ones. She thought she could never fall in love with a pretty boy when she had already fallen in love with a man of a harsher-handsome countenance.

But then she did so why couldn't she let herself love this man? She had told him, she had promised his past self that no matter what he changed into next, she would always love him as he cringed on the TARDIS floor after a shot from a dalek.

Now she knew that he did. So Rose let herself do it, let herself fall into this new new man. She fell with him as he fell, fell until up was down and back was front – until they fell in a heap in the middle.

Rose parted lips and exhaled heavily, her shaky breathe passing over his lips again.

"My Doctor," she whispered reverently, reflecting, "The same man, but so, so different."

He smiled breathlessly, pressing her head down with a hand at her neck, placing a kiss to her hairline.

"New new Doctor," he reminisced fondly.

"New new _new_ Doctor," she affirmed with equal breathlessness, nuzzling into his collarbone.

"Yes," he looked into her eyes. "New new new Doctor. I like that, it has a ring."

She smiled. "No it doesn't, you're sweet, though."

He puckered his lips. "I always try, but I never quite manage a good nickname – I tried the _King_ of _Coolsylvania_ once, but that didn't flow very well when I actually _did_ meet the King of Coolsylvania. That was unfortunate," he trailed off, his lip dragging down at the memory.

Rose chuckled. "You'll have to take me to meet this king, he sounds _fabulous_."

"I should think not!" he exclaimed, 'he dissed the bowtie!"

"And we wouldn't want that," Rose found herself teasing him as easily as if he still wore a plain blue tie, forming the smile that still had his breathe catching in his throat, where her tongue came out to say hello and lick the rim of her teeth.

"No we don't," he composed himself and confirmed. A smile lit his face, hopping up. "Come on," he said, sticking his hand out for her to take. She gripped it immediately and let him haul her up. "Let's go ho—" the Doctor caught his word and wished a machine could be invented to recapture them. Of course there wasn't – once a bell rung and all that.

Rose smiled wistfully, giving his hand a squeeze. "Yeah," she said, his cringe at the incentive remark slipping as she continued, "Let's go home."

He hugged her tight to him, overcome by her words and her acceptance at the new TARDIS – and by so, her gradual acceptance of his new self – and shot off in the direction where that blue box stood, framed against the black of night and the green of rolling hills.

They hollered through the night, filling the darkness with the light of their sounds, as they skipped and ran to their destination. She was reminded so strongly of her times with the other Doctor it almost hurt. Almost.

_This is what coping must be like,_ she thought as she simply ran now, behind the man who continued to shout and boast and sing. _This is how it's supposed to happen. You take the hand that guides you and the memories lose their pain. You smile when you want to cry because it's starting to get ok enough to do that. You go – on. _

And Rose felt that maybe, just maybe, she might just be able to. The Doctor turned back, never stopping always running forward to that next, great adventure, and grinned brilliantly at her. It was a beautiful mix that shadowed both his past selves, the laughing chuckle of her leather-clad Doctor and the manic excitement of her brown and blue Doctor – and Rose was certain that's how this was always meant to be.


End file.
